5 Responses to “A Knight Errant and an Arrant Knave”

venqaxon May 01, 2011 4:05 pm

Someone’s kingdom for an edditer

venqaxon May 01, 2011 4:01 pm

The point is very well-taken. I always suggest using “errant” to mean roaming and homeless– a knight errant didn’t do anything wrong (necessarily). Leave the error-related meaning to the word error. It’s use just make me suspect that the user doesn’t really know what the world means. And arrant? Leave that one alone entirely unless you are obvoiusly a very advaned user of the language. Like (in the US) using “compleat” properly. Chances are you are just going to look like someone who can’t spell.

I put up similiar resistance to “enormity”, as opposed to enormousness, being used to describe physical size, even tho the more anarchist dictionarie’s (MW again) seem to accept the size-related meaning as secondary.

Naomion January 11, 2011 7:20 pm

Awesome!
I’ve heard this word before (mostly on television) and I always wondered what it meant. Great post. 🙂

Deborah Hon November 17, 2010 11:42 am

I think arrant and errant have fallen into disuse because people don’t know which one to choose. Thank you Maeve, for the lesson on these two words, because they are splendid, descriptive adjectives.

I rarely use the words, but I employ a shabby gimmick to help me remember which word I want: I use the word “arrogant” to help me remember arrant, and “error” to help me remember errant.

Tomon November 17, 2010 7:18 am

Cool!

‘Arrant’ may remain in use among classically-educated UK writers, but I can’t imagine it as the 1st choice of even the most precise (or pretentious) US writer.

Would ‘blatant’ be a suitable modern analogue to ‘arrant’, or is there some subtlety of meaning that I’m missing?